Doppelgänger Read online

  “Fitta…cock…fucker…shit…on…your…grave…kuksugare…shit…on…your…grave…”

  Through her fear and horror Anine was amazed that perhaps she could actually communicate with the spirit. “What do you want?”

  “DIE!” cried the doppelgänger, and again repeated itself in Swedish: “DÖ!”

  “You want us dead?” said Julian.

  “DÖD!” (Dead!)

  “Do you want the house?” Anine asked. “Is that what you want?”

  “FITTA!” shouted the spirit. In an even more fiendish snarl—made all the more eerie from the metallic tone of the trumpet—it formed clear words: “Ola…Ber…gen…hjelm!”

  Dorr was beginning to convulse. Froth appeared at the corners of his mouth. Anine had the sense that their window of communication with the doppelgänger was closing.

  “What can we do to put you at peace?” she said. “To cause you to leave us alone?”

  “CUNT!” said the doppelgänger.

  “You won’t win,” Julian taunted. “We will destroy you.”

  “BUGGERER!”

  “Apologize to it,” whispered Anine harshly. “Say you’re sorry.”

  “I will not!”

  “She’s angry. She’s angry at how you treated her. Mrs. Quain, are you angry at Julian? Is that why you’re doing this?”

  The spöke did not respond with words. It played a single ugly and garbled-sounding trumpet note. The end of it became a hack as Dorr gasped for breath. His eyes were tightly shut now. “Will you…leave…these people…in peace?” His body twitched and his right leg kicked Anine painfully in the side, but she didn’t think it was intentional; it was a reflex action. “Will you?” shouted Dorr.

  But the doppelgänger was gone. Dorr was still gasping, his face covered with sweat, but he was no longer physically struggling against the spirit. The crushing pressure on Anine’s abdomen seemed to abate.

  After half a minute, during which the terror and the rush of adrenaline receded, Dorr finally let go of Anine’s and Julian’s hands. Panting, he reached over the end of the chaise longue for his jacket. He removed a handkerchief and began to mop his sweaty brow.

  “I’ve never experienced anything like that before,” said the doctor. “The power of the spirit in this house is incredible.” He glanced first at Julian, then at Anine, with a grave expression on his face. “I think the two of you may be in considerable danger.”

  After the doctor dressed they had a drink in the Green Parlor. Julian turned the gas up as high as it would go and the lights blazed comfortingly. Even Anine had a drink, a large shot of cognac in a snifter. Dr. Dorr maintained his composure but he looked ashen and slightly dazed as he sat with his glass, the flames from the fireplace reflecting on his tiny spectacle lenses. It was hard to know how to begin talking about what had happened.

  “I know what I saw and heard,” said Julian, leaning up against the mantelpiece, “but I want to hear it from you. Were you right? Is it the doppelgänger of Mrs. Quain haunting us?”

  “Yes, I think so,” Dorr replied. “When I asked it who it was I got the strong sense of an almost sarcastic response—‘Don’t you know?’ Then when I asked it if it was Quain I felt a great sense of anger, but not of rejection. If it wasn’t her I think I would have felt something different.”

  “It seemed to get angry when you asked if it was dead,” said Anine.

  “Yes. I don’t fully understand. Doppelgänger are so rare there’s almost nothing known about them. But I get the sense that this one is different even than most. The rage within this being—the incredible rage—it was just…” The doctor’s voice trailed off. He glanced into his snifter and took a drink.

  “Why is it so angry?” Julian asked.

  Dorr looked up at him, then at Anine. He knows what happened, doesn’t he? Pausing again, the doctor looked away. He spoke with a serious tone.

  “Mr. Atherton, in the midst of my contact with the spirit, your wife advised you to apologize to it. While channeling it I sensed a great feeling of wrong, of deprivation. It feels that you’ve taken something from it that it desperately wants back. I can’t guess at what wrong the spirit feels you’ve done it, but I must ask you. I give you my word as a gentleman that I’ll keep it in the strictest confidence. My purpose is not to judge you but to help you rid your house of this spirit. Tell me—what did you do to Mrs. Quain? What does Mrs. Atherton think you should apologize for?”

  Please, tell him, Julian, Anine pleaded silently. There’s nothing to be gained by hiding it anymore.

  His elbow still on the mantelpiece, Julian replied impassively while staring into the fire. “The Quain family defaulted on their mortgage. I bought this house out of foreclosure. Even after the deal was made, Mrs. Quain refused to leave. I had to have her…removed.”

  “Violently?” said Dorr.

  Julian shrugged. “I wasn’t here. We were in Europe at the time. I had my law partner handle it. I know the police were called and there was some sort of scene. I gave no orders other than to simply make sure she left. If they were rough with her it wasn’t my fault. It’s not like I set out to…hurt her.”

  “What happened to Mrs. Quain’s husband?”

  “He died a few years ago,” Anine answered. “In Boston. I believe he was quite a bit older than she was.”

  Dorr drank from his glass. He set it down on the end table, then took off his spectacles and pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “I think it’s beginning to make sense now. The history of the house seems so inoffensive, so opposite what one would expect from a haunted house. No murders, no suicides, no strange and sinister past. I did not realize until tonight that that was the key. This house was a place of happiness—immense happiness. That’s the only explanation for the incredible sense of loss I felt as the spirit possessed me. Ghosts of the dead are often angry, but the source of their anger is typically confusion—they don’t quite understand what’s happened to them and they’re frustrated by their continued inability to get any answers or any closure on their unfinished lives. By contrast the spirit in this house, the doppelgänger, knows precisely what has happened to it. There is no confusion, but there is great sadness, great loss. That can only be because something it valued greatly was taken away from it.”

  “It wants the house,” said Julian, turning away from the fireplace. “Mrs. Quain didn’t want to leave the house, and she resents anyone else living here. That’s why she’s trying to drive us out.”

  “It’s not quite that simple,” Dorr replied. “Your physical presence in the house is only part of it. The greater part of Mrs. Quain’s anguish is the loss of her cherished life which happened to unfold in this house and is strongly rooted to it. She lived here with her husband for twenty years. She raised a son who turned out to be greatly talented and successful. Then her husband died. I speak now as a scientist of the living mind, not a student of the supernatural. I believe the death of her husband began to create a fundamental schism in Mrs. Quain’s personality. He was gone, her son grown and left home. There was a great disconnect between the happy days of her family life and the reality as it must have been after the death of her husband—wandering the empty halls, staring into the bedroom that had once been filled with music and a child’s laughter, remembering things the way they were. Her life was gone, but at least she still had the house. Then when you came along and evicted her from it the schism became complete. Her spirit was too firmly attached here. When the policemen tore her away from her home, what you did was to tear her body away from the spirit that remained. Now the spirit is even angrier, even more despairing. Remaining here did not make matters better. It made them infinitely worse.”

  Anine shuddered. Amidst her sadness and empathy for Mrs. Quain—what must that have been like? Having your spirit literally torn in half?—she felt a touch of sorrow for her own husband. Yes, it was h
is monstrous greed that brought it on, but how could he have been expected to know?

  “If that’s true,” said Julian, “then giving the house back to Mrs. Quain won’t stop it. You’d have to not only give the house back but bring her husband back to life and bring her son back too. Right?”

  That was directed at me, Anine realized, not the doctor.

  With an air of resignation Dorr said, “If my hypothesis is true then it stands to reason there is no way that Mrs. Quain’s spirit can be made whole again.”

  “So what do we do?” Anine asked.

  “I think you should leave.” Dorr finished his drink and set it on the end table, almost as a form of punctuation. “Traditional ghosts can be exorcised. I’m not convinced that the specific religious rituals of the procedure address the root cause of hauntings, but something about exorcism seems effective—the guiding of the troubled spirit toward the final realm of death. Obviously this would not be effective against a doppelgänger. And I do believe you’re in danger. Ghosts do not harm people. At least I’ve never seen a case of the spirit of a dead person physically harming a human being. But this doppelgänger will harm you if it can, any way it can. Its rage is white-hot. It wants to eradicate any chance of happiness within these walls. If it can’t be happy here, no one will. It took only four days for it to drive Mr. Bradbury to suicide, and it seems to have looked into his mind and found exactly the tool to do that: his guilt over his daughter. Whether it intends to bring about your literal deaths is almost immaterial. Driving you into insanity might be just as good. It will stoke conflict between the two of you, sow distrust, provoke retaliations by each of you against the other. It’ll lock you into a cycle of anger and violence from which there is probably no escape. Get out, Mr. Atherton. Take your wife and leave this place. Leave New York. Perhaps leave the country. Preserve your marriage and your sanity. That’s my advice as a doctor.”

  Anine swallowed hard. He’s very perceptive, isn’t he? Conflict, distrust, the provocation of retaliations, a cycle of anger; Dorr had unwittingly described almost the whole of Anine and Julian’s married life together. When she heard him say perhaps leave the country she thought immediately of Sweden. She was grateful to hear someone else’s voice pleading with Julian to do as she had already implored him.

  Julian seemed bewildered. He shook his head quizzically, and actually smiled. “Leave New York?” he scoffed. “Leave the country? Because of Mrs. Quain? I have a law practice here, Doctor. I have political connections. My family has lived in New York since before the Revolution.”

  “I can think of no other solution to your problem,” said Dorr sadly.

  “Julian, we could do it,” Anine spoke up. “It wouldn’t be as bad as you—”

  “Quiet.” Folding his arms Julian turned back to the fireplace. “If we…reasoned with Mrs. Quain, the real Mrs. Quain who lives in Newport, couldn’t we end this? If I were to go to her and apologize, perhaps offer her compensation, we could convince her to call it off, couldn’t we? Why isn’t that the solution?”

  Dorr shook his head. “Mr. Atherton, you don’t seem to understand. It’s not like the doppelgänger is a proxy, a tentacle consciously controlled by the head of the octopus living in Newport. It’s not like she decided, ‘I detest the Athertons, so I think I’ll split myself in two and haunt their house until they kill each other or go mad.’ It doesn’t work that way. Mrs. Quain’s life-force has been shattered by no fault of her own. Even if you could get through to the rational part of her, that’s not what we’re dealing with here. The doppelgänger is pure emotion. It thinks cleverly but only in the service of striking at its enemies. It is not a rational being. And it takes no orders from Mrs. Quain. She couldn’t control it even if she wanted to.”

  “You make it sound as if it’s evil,” said Anine.

  “You could use that word.”

  “But how is that possible? Everyone I’ve talked to speaks of Mrs. Quain as being a completely normal person, a loving wife and mother. Those words it was saying through you—those awful words—they don’t sound like a woman who raised a musical prodigy and lived a quiet life here for so many years. How can it be evil if she isn’t?”

  “I suspect it may be that the intensity of Mrs. Quain’s happiness in this house may also be the source of the depravity of the doppelgänger. Perhaps her life force was not only split, but mirrored—what was light became dark and vice-versa. All I can tell you, madam, is what I felt when the spirit was inside of me. It was raging, filled with murderous, insensate anger. There was not a shred of decency or hope within it. It is a nightmare personified. Even now it’s probably watching us, listening to us. It’s reveling in your fear and your unease. The only way to end this situation is to remove yourselves from it.”

  One of the burning logs in the fireplace broke in half with a flurry of sparks. Anine jumped, startled. She was very much on-edge.

  He’s right, Julian, she said to her husband silently. We have to go. Now, tonight. We’ll go to a hotel and decide what to do next. I bet even getting that far away will improve things between us.

  “Doctor,” said Julian, his tone sounding now almost academic, “these doppelgängers, they’re actually—”

  “Doppelgänger. The singular and plural form are the same.”

  “Well, whatever, but they are essentially the ghosts of living persons, right? However they get this way, whatever causes it, they’re still connected to living people, aren’t they?”

  Dorr looked even more uneasy. “Yes.”

  “Everyone says Mrs. Quain is in very poor health. If she were to die, the doppelgänger would be extinguished, would it not?”

  Anine felt a pang of dread. He’s not thinking of…?

  “Mr. Atherton,” said Dorr, “I don’t think I like where this is going.”

  “No, I need to understand this. We’re dealing with the spirit of someone still alive. If that person dies, their doppelgänger dies with them. That’s only logical, right?”

  “It is logical. But I must stress to you that we have no way of knowing—”

  “Mrs. Quain is an invalid. She must be weak and feeble, shuttered up in that Newport cottage for months. If she passes away, which can’t be too far off, our problem is solved without us having to do anything. Would you say that’s reasonable to assume, Doctor?”

  So that’s it? We sit around in this dreadful house waiting for Mrs. Quain to die? Anine thought this was slightly better than the dark deed she imagined Julian contemplating a moment ago, but not by much. For one thing, it could take years.

  Dorr too seemed bothered. He stood up. “You have heard my recommendation,” he said softly. “I’ll be going now.”

  “Doctor, is what I’ve said reasonable?”

  Dorr turned to Anine. “Mrs. Atherton, I hope I’ve been some help to you. If you will get my coat and hat, please.” Stepping toward the door of the parlor he looked over at Julian. “I’ll send you a bill. I know a gentleman of your means is always prompt with his payments. I wish you the best of luck. You can, of course, count on my complete confidence in this matter.”

  Just before he stepped out of the Green Parlor, the Abyssinian cat darted in front of his feet, out the door and into the darkened entryway. His eyes met Anine’s. A knowing look passed between them. Then he put on his hat and cape, opened the front door onto the rainy night, and as he left Anine realized with fatalistic certainty that she had seen the last of Dr. Andrew Jackson Dorr, psychologist and spiritual medium.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Time of Breaking

  The séance—or, perhaps more precisely, the knowledge of what the spöke was and what it wanted—changed something in the house. Anine slept badly that night, but it was the first night that Julian had slept in her bed in several weeks. He kept the revolver on the bedside table, which she thought ridiculous since it would be useless against the doppelgänger
, but she said nothing. There was the sense now that they were beleaguered, that the spöke was holding them hostage and they must stand together if they were to have any chance of persevering in the house. She found a kernel of hope in this notion, but she was skeptical it would last. The doppelgänger, above all things, wanted to foster conflict between them.

  The doppelgänger reacted in its own way. The morning after the séance began the period that Anine came to refer into her own mind the time of breaking. It began at breakfast when the sugar bowl on the table suddenly and spontaneously crumbled into shards. No one was touching it and in fact Mrs. Hennessey was staring right at it when it happened. Chinkkk! Suddenly the sugar was a small mound on the table, studded with bits of broken porcelain. “My, how did that happen?” said Mrs. Hennessey. Anine was silent. The cook evidently knew nothing of the supernatural disturbances and Anine was not eager to bring a new person into the circle.

  Later that morning Miss Wicks came to the Green Parlor. “Miss Anine, I’ve got something to report,” she said. “I woke up this morning and the mirror in my room was broken. It was nothing I did.”

  Anine looked up from her cards, paused a moment and then stood up. “You’re certain of it? That it was nothing you did?”

  “I’m not in the habit of throwing things at mirrors.”

  “Of course you’re not. Let’s go look at it.”

  Clea brought her to the maid’s quarters in the garret. Indeed the small mirror over Clea’s bureau looked as if a stone had been thrown squarely at it. The ruptures in the glass radiated from a central point of impact, looking eerily like a spider web. Anine touched the edge of one of the shards. “You didn’t see it break, Clea?”

  “No. I got out of bed this morning and found it like this.”

  “You heard no disturbance during the night?”

  “No. None.”